Broadmeadows

An army camp becomes a temporary home

A Commonwealth programme reproduced by the Migration Heritage Project lists Broadmeadows for displaced-person workers and families. Accommodation was already available while further construction continued. The entry shows a family function alongside the supply of housing for workers.

The hostel also offered emergency shelter. When flooding forced nearly a thousand residents from the Williamstown racecourse accommodation in April 1950, they were evacuated to Broadmeadows for four days. Migration accommodation could therefore operate as a connected network when an individual site became uninhabitable.

Opening and closing

The Migration Heritage Project’s compilation of parliamentary returns dates the hostel more precisely than the local accounts do. Its table of Commonwealth hostels in Victoria records Broadmeadows as having commenced operation at some point between 1 July 1945 and 19 December 1949, and as having closed down on 21 August 1971. A workers’ hostel table of about 1951 lists Broadmeadows under displaced-person workers and families, with accommodation fully available and some construction still proceeding, and an estimated date of completion of March 1951.

That places Broadmeadows among the hostels built in the industrial or less developed outer suburbs of Melbourne, which Heritage Victoria lists as Altona, Broadmeadows, Holmesglen, Maribyrnong, Nunawading and Preston. These were distinct from the country holding centres such as Benalla and Rushworth: the hostels housed workers and, where there was room, their families, while the holding centres took dependants whose breadwinner was working elsewhere.

Olga’s years in the kitchen

The fullest Ukrainian account of the hostel is a memoir published by Kalyna Care in 2012. Olga had been in displaced-person camps around Bielefeld and Munster, and sailed for Australia in October 1949 with a two-year-old son. Her ship, the Fairsea, broke down in the Suez Canal and had to put back to Naples, where the passengers transferred to the Castel Bianco; they reached Port Melbourne on 24 May 1950. She was sent first to Mildura and then to Bonegilla, where she worked in the kitchen for Commonwealth Hostels Limited. Her wages were two pounds a week after food and board were deducted, and she gave most of her food ration tickets to her son.

Because she was alone she was kept on by the hostels after she had worked off her passage, and in 1953 she was transferred to what she calls the Broadmeadows army barracks in Camp Road, where a new migrant centre had been opened. She worked in its kitchen for nearly fifteen years. She was naturalised on 8 December 1958, and in 1959 she rented a bungalow in Broadmeadows. Her memoir says the hostel was then closing and transferring to Maribyrnong, which cannot be reconciled either with her own fifteen years of work there or with the closing date of 1971 in the parliamentary returns; her move out is the part of it that the article relies on.

Her later working life was at LM Ericsson, in the catering section of the factory, for fifteen years until she was told to retire at nearly sixty-nine, after which she still worked special functions for the company once or twice a year. Of the ten women who had worked with her at the hostel, she wrote in 2012, only one was still alive.

Ukrainian family and community life

One Ukrainian mother arrived at Broadmeadows in 1953 after earlier stays in Mildura and Bonegilla. She worked in hostel kitchens while raising her son. Her photographs show children outside Nissen huts and a group of young friends at the hostel.

Her account describes a growing Ukrainian community around Glenroy and Broadmeadows. Families travelled to Ukrainian services in central Melbourne and to gatherings in South Melbourne. Children first attended Ukrainian lessons in a local garage before activities moved to Essendon; boys also took part in scouting and football.

For this family, leaving the hostel meant renting a bungalow in 1959. School costs influenced the move from Catholic to state education. Later employment in a factory’s catering section formed part of the transition to independent housing and working life.

A community built outside the hostel

Olga’s account is precise about where Ukrainian life actually happened, and it was not at the hostel. Families travelled into the city to St Augustine’s for Sunday mass in Ukrainian, and to South Melbourne for community events, until a community centre was bought at Essendon near the railway station. The children’s Ukrainian school began in a garage at one of the houses in Broadmeadows and then moved to Essendon. The boys had their own scout group and formed a soccer team.

She also travelled on her days off to friends from Bielefeld who had settled at Ardeer, going by train to Sunshine and then by bus, and walking the nine kilometres when the buses did not run. Ardeer, she writes, became known in the 1960s as little Ukraine because so many Ukrainian families had moved into the new suburb. Broadmeadows itself was filling with housing commission estates of pre-fabricated concrete houses and with factories, and she describes homes going up at what felt like one every four weeks.

Children enter local schools

Westbreen Primary School absorbed many children from the nearby military-camp hostel. By 1954 more than 40 per cent of its pupils were migrants, speaking more than a dozen languages between them. The old public hall was brought back into educational use and classrooms were added repeatedly as the surrounding population grew.

These figures describe the school, not the hostel’s population. They reveal how migrant accommodation affected established neighbourhood institutions: temporary housing generated an immediate need for school places, even before families moved into permanent homes.

A changing hostel population

Broadmeadows continued to receive newcomers beyond the first postwar refugee arrivals. An official Federal Court account records a Greek family reaching the hostel in April 1968, before moving through shared houses. Museums Victoria identifies the hostel as an early home for Turkish immigrants who subsequently settled in Broadmeadows and Coburg.

A surviving management notebook covers weekend and night duties from July 1970 to September 1974. Its catalogue describes reports of the problems encountered by staff. This administrative record carries the hostel’s story into the 1970s, well beyond the departure dates recalled by individual earlier residents.